Sorry for not posting here in a while! After GeekGirlCon I decided I'd spend this whole month not working on Refactor. However, I just decided to break that in order to fix a long-standing issue with physics in Little Bouncing Ball, especially in preparation for another show I'm going to be at this weekend. (Busy days!)

There were a couple of problems with the ball collision physics; sometimes it seemed like the ball was just tunneling through the paddle, and sometimes corner hits weren't registering correctly. These turned out to actually be the same problem in the end – my quick AABB check for ball-paddle collisions wasn't accounting for the radius of the ball itself! Oops.

However, before I figured that out, I decided to also make a change to the collision logic to make collisions a bit more robust in high-velocity situations by having the ball only able to collide with front faces of a collider, based on the ball's velocity. Implementing this change was pretty simple, and while I was at it I cleaned up some code that was storing a bunch more than it needed to, so that'll be good for performance (or at least not bad).

There are still situations where a ball can tunnel through the paddle, because I'm still being lazy about some stuff in the physics engine. But fixing that will have to wait until another day.

Speaking of another day, there's a few other things I've done in the time since GeekGirlCon; I fixed a few of the dialog paths in Strangers (including one particularly goofy issue I ran into), and I cleaned up a bunch of the internal code as well, particularly stuff I wrote when I was still learning Lua. These are just internal things that shouldn't affect gameplay itself, but it makes my code more maintainable and that always makes me happy.

In other Refactor news, I've been thinking long and hard about the game design for tracks 3 (Sliced by a Mandolin) and 7 (Flight); Flight is definitely the one I'm going to do next, and at least with the design I have for it I should be able to do it in just a week or two. So we can look forward to that in November.

Finally, after a good bunch of conversations with a number of developers I respect, I decided to actually institute the pricing plan I intended all along for Refactor; originally I was making the early access period free while it was still experimental, but now I have some actual games here and so the minimum price to buy the game is the square root of the number of completed tracks. (So, for example, it is $1.41 right now, and will go up to $1.73 after I finish Flight, and $2 after the next track, and so on, all the way up to $3.61 when all 13 tracks are done.) I will of course re-evaluate pricing as I go (especially regarding the soundtrack bundle). But if you want the best deal, so to speak, buy sooner rather than later!

My main reason for doing this is because I feel like people who have some small financial investment in the game are more likely to provide feedback that keeps me motivated to keep on working. When the game is free, it gets a lot of downloads that go into a black hole; when people care about the game and supporting it, I feel way more connected to them.

Patreon patrons, of course, can request an access code to get the game as part of their patronage.